SPEAKING OF ART

by Betti Watts

Artists, homosexuals, religionists, astrologers, etc., all felt the crunch of Hitler's heel as he stomped through Europe. Max Beckmann, a German expressionist -damned as a decadent artist by Hitler-fled Germany, arriving in 1937 in Holland. This was the second interruption in his career.

He had served during the First World War in hospitals, especially. at Ostend, Belgium, as an orderly and ambulance driver. The emotional scar this experience created deepened his already existent tendency towards pathos and augmented his hopelessness about civilization.

Beckman was not alone.

The expressionist movement, which began among the young artists of Dresden in 1905, was fomented by social turmoil, repression, and restriction. However, a surge of imperialism and trade expansionism raged world-wide, particularly with

REVIEW

respect to China. The European market was unstable because of inflation and the United States' economic policies. Unemployment and recession were rampant. It was a period not unlike today.

It was also strangely simlar to the pre-Reformation period in Europe when China was discovered, the House of Huber flourished, and money was re-introduced in trade. for the first time since the Dark Ages. Incredible trade expansion whizzed around the civilized world' at the time. Savonarola preached his doomsday sermons, setting the stage for Martin Luther. Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter, did his sexually aberrant erotic altarpieces for the Roman Catholic Church.

It is not surprising that "The Bridge" (as the early expressionists were called) should have been interested in Bosch. His writhing figures, engaging in erotic behavior

Sappho a beautiful tribute to lesbian love and lovers

Sappho: The Art of Loving Women, poetry by Sappho, photography by J. Frederick Smith. (Chelsea House, 1975) 159 pgs. $30.00.

by S. Regal

This must be the most beautiful book in the world. It is a collection of lovely, passionate, and erotic pictures of lesbian love. The women involved have clearly not been artificially posed for these shots; their emotions, their genuine feelings are reflected in their tender gestures towards each other. They are radiant. They bathe, walk, daydream, and make love surrounded by nature by snow, sun, sea, fire.

Though the photos are rich, and it is said that one picture is worth more than a thousand words, the poetry of Sappho printed under beside them embellishes them fur-

ther, giving the book a luxury of expression neither photos nor words alone could have achieved.

The expression of Sappho's love for Atthis "But oh, who ever felt as I?" placed beside a picture of a woman caressing and licking her lover's neck is not only a beautiful juxtaposition, it is genuinely erotic. The few remaining fragments of Sappho's poetry most of which was gleefully destroyed by sexist barbarians after the establishment of the Christian church ring down the ages. "Men I think will remember us long after," she wrote.

Yes, Mother Sappho, and women too. Above all women who share the special kind of love that was yours. Let us revel in this thoughtful tribute -whatever its source to lesbians everywhere, and everywhen.

VERSIERA

by Christine Potters

(Continued from Page B8) women is harder to define. I think it is more than anything a denial of powerlessness, rather than an acquisition of power. Because we have so little power we degrade whichever of our sisters has less than we do: single heterosexual women put down lesbians, married heterosexual women put down single heterosexual women (and lesbians), mothers put down nonmothers (and lesbians), and so on ad nauseum. At the same time Everywoman is belittling the lesbian, the lesbian is belittling Everywoman after all, the lesbian stands on her own two feet and isn't dependent on The Man. These examples illustrate only one aspect of male behavior in women: tyranny over those who appear weak. We are also guilty of sexism, racism, ageism, and more-radical-thanthouism, to name but a few.

Third, what about Dottie's question? Why do some lesbians use

male behavior with other women? Right on the surface, without any political analysis at all, it's what we've learned from the heterosexual role model: if you love women, you must be a man. Although most of us now reject the "butch" stereotype it is much more difficult to reject the male attitude. A self-described lesbian-feminist was asked recently at a meeting for her definition of a liberated woman. "It's a woman who can pat another woman's ass and not feel uptight about it," she replied. Well, sister, I hope you were joking and I hope you heard the gasp that went round the room in response to your male attitude. Rejecting the male role model makes it necessary for us to seek out and define a lesbian image. That image can't be a stereotype patterned after someone's idea of how men act or how women act, but must be a new vision of the woman's woman. And the woman's woman must be a feminist.

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imbued with a weird aestheticism, foreshadowed Beckmann in allegorical themes and social criticism.

Originally, the expressionists were neither political nor revolutionary. Only slightly activist, they were yet sympathetic to oppressed groups: prostitutes, the

poor, prisoners, etc. Their ideology was based on theories of German writer Wilhelm Worringer and French philosopher Henri Bergson. They advocated intuition, empathy, and subjectivity.

Most had seen active duty and were in consequence anti-war. As the war became more severe (around 1916), apocalyptical conceptions became more extreme and despair overwhelming. (Dostoievsky's psychological novels caught Beckmann's imagination and he did a series of lithographs on the House of the Dead.) However, they still highly unrealistically hoped for the eventual brotherhood of man and some combined activism with a kind of religio-politik. As the advocates of violence and the more conservative revolutionaries became disillusioned, their art burst forth with almost savage energy.

Colors were intense, lines slashing, brush strokes brutal with thick, spontaneous impasto. The subject matter was humanity in all its chaos, suffering, and emotionality. Often the environment was omitted, as in the "Divan," a pen-and-ink drawing by Beckmann. Figures were large, painted or drawn frontally and filling the picture plane. This gave a powerfully uneasy effect of objects and people tumbling towards the viewer.

While the basic impact of expressionism was emotive, it was often overtly erotic or at least had suggestive overtones. It was concerned with non-modeled plastic form. This and the acute angularity of the black line caused a sense of other-worldly weightlessness.

The Amazonian women on Beckmann's divan seem to be indifferent. Each seems to be in her own world. The preoccupied insomniac, with the vacant look, legs awkwardly crossed as if sitting rather than attempting to sleep, contrasts with the sleeper who turns her back. She is inert, almost socially apathetic, her hat betraying a kind of imperviousness. The character of the linear brushwork is jagged, irregular, angular, while the textures are sparse and somewhat arbitrary. Asymmetrical black areas are juxtaposed within a rhomboidal framework. Large bulbous volumes in the legs, the arms, the edge of the divan yield the only visual stability in this bird's-eye view.

Beckmann's major work was oil painting, of which he did some 800. He often followed the triptych pattern of church altar pieces. He also did a large quantity of prints and drawings, especially during the war years when it was difficult to produce more sustained work. His structural form was probably based on medieval art, which crowded the picture plane with figures in a nonperspectival stratification. Figures in the foreground were smaller, in the background larger.

Contrary to common belief, perspective-a Renaissance invention for simulating space-does not realistically present it. It is a geometrical construct and locates. objects in a mathematically oriented space, causing them to relate to the horizon line in an orderly recessive manner. Beckmann rejected this

Photo by Harry Eberlin

"Divan" by Max Beckmann

Photo by Harry Eberlin

"Jacob Wrestles with the Angel" by Max Beckmann. Renaissance idea and eliminated the horizon line, like the Medieval painters who did their work before Alberti's and Ucello's discovery of perspective.

sequence is a sensuous up-and-down movement.

This denial and exclusion of perspective is prevalent in the etching, "Jacob. Wrestles with the Angel." Apparently Beckmann combined and interpreted two episodes about Jacob from the Bible, the ladder dream and the angelic wrestling bout. Compositionally there is frontal stacking, sharp obliquity, and fitfully etched lines that create a startled effect. The picture is structured around a zig-zag which begins at the upper left-hand corner, descends to the lower edge, then rises again with the ladder. It climaxes over the angel's head, then falls to the lower right-hand corner, where the rocks Jacob used for his pillow are precariously balanced. The

con-

Beckmann has here eliminated from the tableau God and all but one angel. He has situated Jacob on the ladder with the angel. The angel's legs are spread apart. Jacob fits in between them, with his arms embracing the girth of the angel. As if surprised by his own eroticism, the angel's arms are propelled upward. The angel stares into space; Jacob, with his head turned, has his eyes closed.

Beckmann said of himself: "When spiritual, metaphysical, material or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting... I hardly need to abstract them, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting."

GAY NEWS May 1976 Page B9

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